If you can't consistently funnel waves onto a Logistics or home command system, you get salvage rates of 4 or 5 percent

Home command station's 40% salvage rate is ludicrously OP. My only Diff10 victory, I soaked waves on my homeworld *the entire game*. That's insane. And that was before warp counterattack guard posts got moved out! So I was soaking THOSE on my homeworld. Every wave was 20% of a golem or something. Totally worth it. Did the same thing on my last Diff 9 game; yeah, I had to bring my fleet home for waves toward the end, but by that point I had too many Trader goodies on my HW to change my mind.

Zenith Trader is a BIG culprit here. Needs to die.

Turn it off.

I do agree that the salvage on the homeworld command station is nuts, and also that it's too low on Mil/Econ command stations. The gap needs to be tightened up. Maybe it should be more universal rather than command station specific.

...which further slows the refleeting process and increases wait time again. Another point for chokepointing.

Mines (and the line place tool) really are the true MVP of defense. Making those per-planet would be nice, but you would have to tune it very carefully because nobody in their right mind wouldn't use the entire cap on every planet.

Mines (and the line place tool) really are the true MVP of defense. Making those per-planet would be nice, but you would have to tune it very carefully because nobody in their right mind wouldn't use the entire cap on every planet.

The value of mines would change significantly if the AI ever figured out not to fly straight lines from warp gate to target.

Morale seems like a worse kick in the pants than reprisals. Reprisals mean you get your teeth kicked in *somewhere else* where you aren't getting wrecked. If you're doing badly on a planet, because that planet is a brutal nut to crack, then you don't need a mechanic that makes it HARDER to crack the longer you fail. I mean, unless the intent is to encourage players to give up and use Warheads.

The more I think about morale the more I feel like it is a means to encourage players to do other things. So I am starting to think maybe instead of sticks there are carrots to encourage maybe if an player attack fails, rather then making an attack on that world even more painful other attacks become less painful. It would give a nice break to players not playing on snake worlds.

Instead of morale, what about pilots being cloned/un-cryo'ed at a certain rate. "Available pilots" would be a sort of resource whose income could be increase by science and/or assets.

I don't like the idea of having human lives at stake (even if "it's just a game"). But if it's going to be a thing in AIW2, I wish it would be much clearer and mechanically coherent. For instance, in AIW1, there is a sense of "death of Humans induce AIP": cryopods, bubble cities, rebelling colonies, etc. But not for colony ships and orbital command stations (but there is the shark plot). While I would prefer to not have human lives at all in the game, if you make it, make it completely.

On a more technical note, I like reprisal/salvage as it is and I don't see the need for improvements here. Wether that "morale" (or human lives) mechanism is an improvement, that's another question, and for now I vaguely think it's not.

Morale? I had the impression that there aren't enough humans to keep spawning pilots, much less morale. i.e. no humans exist in fleetships.

For players to like morale, you want to first allow them to grow emotional-attachment - this is only really possible for champion-type units and center-pieces of human fleets, which have human commanders in them.

Whether you want human commanders in ships is another topic.

= = = =I though salvage and reprisal was covered in another thread? O.oSalvage: Generally against. Meaningful player choice != small-percentage from any killed vessels, by any means. The Vasari in Sins had universal salvage from destroying enemy cap-ships and facilities, and I don't remember anyone ever talking about it.

Reprisal: In principle maybe, but it could do with more variety and initial ramp-up. The humans are playing as Palestine in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Take that how you will, but it's at least of the same orders of magnitude difference in power and influence.- Initial reprisals are non-existent.- The AI makes meaningful or symbolic counterstikes. Rather than release threat to existing countermeasures, commit ships to counterattack on a particular player asset not on the homeworld. Or, release multi-front raid targeting all resource deposits.